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"I believe we've got to have some reservoir of relief or we'll have riots. . . . I'm willing to go before the country for the whole people while President Hoover goes before them for his 'selected clientele.' "
Minority Leader Snell went into the well to make the Republican retort: "I've listened to the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee's speech of acceptance. ... He has made a more direct appeal for class distinction than has been made this session. If the Speaker ever made a demagogic appeal, he made that appeal here today—"
"Remember November!" shrilled a girl's voice in the gallery. She was Elizabeth Heiser, daughter of an Aberdeen, S. Dak. farmer whose home was about to be foreclosed on a $1,000 mortgage. Guards put Miss Heiser out of the gallery while Democrats cheered her challenge.
Stung by the Speaker's attack. President Hoover answered with a sizzling public statement explaining his objections to the relief bill. Excerpts:
"The fatal difficulty is the Speaker's insistence upon provision that loans should be made to individuals, private corporations, partnerships, states and municipalities on any conceivable security and for every purpose. Such an undertaking makes the Reconstruction Corp. the most gigantic banking and pawnbroking business in all history. ... It would compel the R. F. C. to deal with millions of people in terms of hundreds of thousands of small and large loans. It would require the extension of branch offices in every town and county and set up a huge bureaucracy able to dictate the welfare of millions of people. . . . The proposal is impossible of execution and huge losses and great scandals must inevitably result. . . . There will be inevitable discriminations ... the squandering of hundreds of millions of dollars. . . . The organization would be subject to predatory corporations and interests everywhere.
"To hold out hope that the Government is prepared to take care of [the country's] credit needs with the ridiculously small sum provided [$1,500,000,000] must be condemned as a deception. . . .
"The measure proposed and insisted upon, even to the extent of defeat of relief legislation, by the Speaker, threatens disaster to our people. ... I cannot accept the proposal for I do not propose to further increase unemployment by jeopardizing the whole credit of the Government and laying our people open to every kind of injustice and loss."
This White House broadside meant only one thing—a veto for the relief bill which represented three months hard work by Congress. Surprising to many was the President's opposition to loans to private industry because he had recommended that very thing last December when he outlined the R. F. C. Last May Secretary Mills, as the President's spokesman, appeared before a Senate committee to urge advances to private corporations for self-liquidating construction, only to have the Senate reject it. Last week the President retreated from his own proposal when he saw it extended to the smallest merchant, the one-plow farmer, the corner bootblack.